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User blog:SeaWing/HV Solar Array Factory
There are some great vids on YT about how to make High Voltage Solar Arrays (HVSA) automatically. The designs are very creative and it is obvious a lot of work went into implementing them. All of these videos suggest using Energy Condensors to aquire the raw materials for the Arrays. This makes sense given the amount of resources required to make just one HVSA. It seems nearly impossible to do it without them. But can it be done without them and if so, why? 'A Look At Resources' HVSA's need 8 MV Arrays, which need 8 LV Arrays, which need 8 Solar Panels. That's 8 x 8 x 8 = 512 Solar Panels for one HV Array. That's a lot of Solar Panels. So essentially an HVSA factory is a Solar Panel factory. How much raw materials are needed for an HVSA? Here's the breakdown for one Solar Panel: 1 Generator *1 Furnace **8 Cobblestone *1 Machine Block **8 Refined Iron (Smelted Iron Ingot) *1 Battery **4 Tin Ingot **2 Redstone Dust **1 Copper Cable ***0.5 Copper Ingot ***1 Rubber / 0.33 Sticky Resin (Extracted) 2 Circuits *1 Refined Iron (Smelted Iron Ingot) *2 Redstone Dust *6 Copper Cables **3 Copper Ingot **6 Rubber / 2 Sticky Resin (Extracted) 3 Coal Dust (Macerated Coal) 3 Glass (Macerated and smelted Cobblestone) 'A Couple Of Problems' I have made Solar Panel factories using Condensors and without them. Of course, a passive factory that relied on a Quarry alone for materials always required a lot of running around and was never fully automated. Designing a factory without Condensors will face a couple of problems right away. There is no way to automate the collection of Sticky Resin from Rubber trees. Using the Treetap with a vanilla Dispenser doesn't work, neither will a RedPower2 Deployer even though it emulates a players right-click with the chosen tool. I assume it has something to do with not recognizing a tool from another mod, or the Resin doesn't release because it is blocked by the Deployer placed directly in front of it. The resources that come from the Quarry are found at different levels, like Redstone found in the bottom 16 levels and Tin in the bottom 40. And Iron is not as abundant as other materials such as Copper, Tin, Coal and Cobblestone. Not only do these other materials collect and become a storage problem, but the Solar Panels cannot begin to be made until the Quarry gets down to the Redstone level. Until then, Furnaces, Copper, Tin, Machine Blocks, Coal Dust and Glass will start to fill the Automatic Crafting Tables and Chests with no place to go. 'Solution # 1...' An Energy Condensor is the best solution for supplementing the supply of raw materials such as Sticky Resin, Redstone, and Tin. Resin isn't actually supplimented because it doesn't come out of the ground, so it needs to have a dedicated and constant source. Tin won't appear until level 40 and Redstone at level 16 which may take the Quarry some time to reach depending on the dimensions. Both of those will need a Condensor from the start as well. But there's no shortage of EMC coming out of the Quarry especially with unused items such as Rubies, Sapphires, Emeralds, Uranium, Diamonds and Tungsten. Hypothetically and with liberal estimations, suppose a 64 x 64 Quarry yields 50 Diamonds, 20 Tungsten, 3 stacks of Uranium and 5 stacks total of the three Gems. Roughly 1.8 million EMC of the needed 2.5 million EMC can be mined from this Quarry to produce one HVSA. And this is not taking into account the 10 stacks or so of Nikolite which can easily mass up another 80,000 to 100,000 EMC, plus the EMC from all the miscellaneous Cobblestone, Dirt, Gravel, Marble and Flint which can add another 225,000 EMC. Diamonds 50 x 8192 = 409,600 Tungsten 20 x 16,384 = 327,680 Uranium 192 x 4096 = 786,432 Gems 320 x 1024 = 327,680 Total = 1,851,392 Nikolite 100,000 Misc. 225,000 Total = 2,176,392 EMC The amount of EMC coming from the Quarry comes up a little short of the amount needed for the HVSA so naturally more mining is needed, and nobody builds a Quarry for one use anyway. Also, who wants to stop at just one HVSA? The EMC can be rounded up if you add your mob drops into the Condensor. In general, it can be estimated that a full-size Quarry will generated one High Voltage Solar Array. So, the Condensor solves the problem of providing Sticky Resin without manually tapping trees and providing resources when they are needed, not just when they are found. This also solves the problem of amassing huge quantities of materials from the Quarry which require an ever growing storage facility. But what else is there? 'Solution # 2...' I have used Energy Condensors and I think they are great but there is a problem with using them. They work so well that reaching the end of the game can come too fast, whatever "the end of the game" means. When the challenges of designing and building the factory have already been met, a new challenge can be to aquire raw materials without using Energy Condensors. And the first thing that comes to mind is, of course, Mass Fabricators. 'UU-Matter and You' After running the HV Solar Array factory for some time it seemed that the three quarries could not supply materials fast enough. I had to find an additional source for Iron, Copper and Tin. Since I had an enormous quantity of Cobble, Dirt, Gravel and Marble coming from the Quarries it seemed a perfect opportunity to turn it all into the materials I needed. I set up five Recyclers and connected them to an Energy Condenser that received those items through an Item Teleport Pipe. The Condenser was just a way to make all the items into Cobblestone so that there wasn't any clogging problems with the Recyclers. The Scrap is piped out to two Mass Fabricators powered by an MFSU and four HV Solar Arrays. It started out with one MF and as many MV Arrays I had and eventually expanded as the factory produced more Solar Panels and Arrays. One HVSA is enough to power one MF but had very little power left over for night use, so two is preferred. The resulting UU-Matter is piped to a couple of Automatic Crafting Table Mk IIs which are set to produce the raw materials the factory needs. One of the ACTs is set to make Iron Ore exclusively as Iron is always the limiting factor in the whole process, while the other Table gets manually switched to Copper Ore, Tin Ore or Sticky Resin as it is needed. These fabricated materials are then sent to the Macerators or Extractors where they enter the factory's processing stream. This additional supply of resources has sped up the production of HVSAs quite well but the factory is still not operating constantly, the materials are still coming in slower than the factory can use them. I noticed that the new system could be tweaked a little. It requires five UU-Matter to produce two Iron Ore for a total of four Iron Ingots. Each Solar Panel needs five Iron Ore which is about 12.5 UU-Matter. It was obvious I needed more Mass Fabricators to keep up. Instead I decided to build another factory to make Iron from Redstone Dust. 'An Iron Rich Diet' The Mass Fabricators go a long way to aleviating resource problems for the HVSA factory. But even with problems solved, nothing is ever good enough. The Fabs are furiuosly kicking out Matter for many items and keeping up is getting to be a problem. Copper requires 3 UU-Matter, Tin requires 3, Sticky Resin 4, and Redstone 4. The recipe for Iron needs a whopping five UU-Matter and only yields 2 Ores / 4 Ingots. One Solar Panel needs 10 Iron total which means 15 (12.5 really) UU-Matter had to be produced. This was taking too long. Luckily there is a work-around. It happens that a Sensor block from the CCSensors mod can be smelted to produce four Iron Ingots. This, it turns out, is the industrial mother lode. The Sensor is crafted with a piece of Cobble, one stick and a Computer Redstone Chip. A Computer Redstone Chip is crafted with three Redstone Dusts across the middle with Sticks across the top and bottom, resembling a real circuit chip. Now this is great because making Redstone from UU-Matter is a very efficient process. Four UU-Matter makes 24 Redstone. This 24 Redstone is used to make eight Sensors which when smelted is 32 Iron Ingots, from four UU-Matter. That is an increase in efficiency of over 8 times that of making Iron Ore straight from UU-Matter. Upon this discovery (and many lives were lost bringing this inforation to us) an adjunct factory was setup next to the pipe network near the Induction Furnaces. Four Automatic Crafting Table Mk.IIs were placed to handle the crafting of Wood into Planks, Planks into Sticks, Sticks and Redstone into Chips and Chips, Sticks and Cobble into Sensors. Why in the heck a Sensor would smelt into Iron from these three raw ingredients, I don't know. But it works and the difference it makes to the production of HVSAs is incredible. The factory is now running constantly, finally. And the great thing is that with the abundance of Redstone Dust coming from a Quarry, this adjunct factory can be setup early on even before the Mass Fabricators are in place. The Mass Fabs aren't much good until at least two HVSAs have come off the assembly line, so the Sensor factory can greatly speed up the establishment of the SA factory when starting out. I wish I had known this from the beginning, but I didn't. It had to be learned where the bottlenecks in the system were (availability of Iron) before it was even considered. With Iron being created from Redstone Dusts, which is being fabricated anyway with the Mass Fabs, The Fabs are now freed up for the creation of more Tin, Copper and Sticky Resin, which are all now in higher demand because of the 800% increase in Iron production. And Solar Panels are rolling off the assembly line like Volkswagens during the 60's. I love it when a plan comes together. Category:Blog posts